What are our Key Records?
Each playhouse district has a set of “Key Records” that help tell its story. These documents range from lawsuits to petitions to diary entries. These are a curated set of 10-12 archival records, drawn from the many that pertain to each playhouse district, and they relate a series of representative or telling “events.” These documents have been transcribed from their original manuscript sources. Many of these documents predate or postdate our “anchor” date of 1616, but we have sought to show each district across a range of time, plotted as best as possible onto our 1616 maps.
What are our Key Events?
Each Key Record is the source for one or more Key Events. These Events do not provide exhaustive accounts of these playhouses’ history, but they offer a colorful and representative sample of each theatrical neighborhood or Playhouse District.
How have we approached People, Places and Collectives important to the Playhouse Districts?
By using databases and coding (TEI-XML), we have “tagged” each of our Key Records so that every person or group that features in them and each location mentioned has an entry in our searchable People, Places and Collectives tables. A Collective might be an occupation, a troupe of players or a group of petitioners, for example. Each of the places is also mapped and navigable on the respective playhouse district maps, and linked to related events, people and collectives. We have also included significant places not mentioned in our Key Records. These are drawn from our background research in developing the maps and their neighborhoods (see About our maps).
We hope this approach begins to suggest relationships within and between different playhouses and their neighborhoods. For instance, a player performing at one playhouse might live on the doorstep of another, or a businesswoman in one district might have shares in another district’s playhouse, and so forth. Here, then, we start to map some of the personal networks behind the Early Modern playing industry.
